Sic Semper Erat

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Setting Aspects

To help create the experience of living in the Middle Ages, thinking like a medieval mind, and acting like a medieval person, we have two setting aspects that apply to all scenes: The Three Orders and Christendom. These allow the GM to compel you to act the way someone in the Middle Ages would, and force you to endure them if you try to act in an anachronistic way. Of course, you can always refuse a compel, and you can succeed on a roll even when you endure a d20 aspect like one of these, so just as in history, these seemingly immovable social forces are, in fact, not.

Dreams

In “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco presented ten “Little Middle Ages,” dreams, or stereotypes, about the Middle Ages that define the different (and often contradictory) ways that we think about them. Anders Nygaard wrote a roleplaying game called “The New Middle Ages, or, Ten Ways to Dream About the Middle Ages,” inspired by this essay that put how we think about history front and center into gameplay. To add this dimension to our Chronica Feudalis game, we’ve added dreams.

Dreams are setting-level aspects. If you ever don’t have a dream, roll 1d8 and use the dream rolled.

If you endure the dream aspect and succeed on the roll, or refuse a compel on the dream aspect, it steps down one die size.

If you invoke the dream aspect and succeed on the roll, or use it to declare something, it steps up one die size.

If the dream is at d4 and steps down, remove it. At this point, you don’t have a dream, so you’ll roll 1d8 to choose a new one. That means there’s a 12.5% chance that you’ll get the same d4 dream again.

Between games, a d4 dream can be replaced with a new dream at d8. The new dream must differ significantly from any previous dream.

Character Conversion

To turn a character from Crusader Kings II into an antagonist or mentor, begin by translating his attributes to skills.

Diplomacy

Entice

Martial

Fend

Stewardship

Command

Intrigue

Deceive

For each of these, the score translates into a die:

0 – 7

8 – 10

11 – 15

16 – 20

21+

Learning does not map well to any of the skills in Chronica Feudalis. If the character’s learning is 8 or less, you can give him the aspect Witless; if his learning is 15 or more, you can give him the aspect Learned.

Give the character an aspect based on his traits. His education trait can suffice, but for characters with lots of interesting traits you may want to try to be more creative to better capture the whole picture that they paint together.

A character with prestige greater than 1,000 might have the aspect Exalted Among Men, while a character with piety greater than 500 might have the aspect Paragon of Virtue.

To convert a Crusader Kings II character to an agent character in Chronica Feudalis, use the same conversion table for attribute score to die size, but instead of individual skills, map attributes to skill groups like so: